A Key to the Louvre: Memoirs of a Curator

by Michel Laclotte

Art historian, curator, and museum director Michel Laclotte has been at the forefront of French cultural life over the past half century. This informal autobiography sheds light on his brilliant career with warmth and directness. Highlights include twenty years as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Musée du Louvre, heading the team that created the Musée d'Orsay, and taking the reins of the Louvre to lead the effort that culminated in the museum's transformation into the “Grand Louvre,” one of the world's preeminent cultural attractions.

Raising the curtain on fifty years of Western art scholarship, intrigue, and achievement, Laclotte introduces an extraordinary cast of characters who set France's cultural direction in the postwar period from Charles de Gaulle and André Malraux in the 1950s to François Mitterand in the 1980s and 1990s. His story overlaps with virtually every major scholarly figure in French art history of the last half-century, as well as Laclotte's mentors and colleagues throughout and beyond Europe, from Roberto Longhi and Anthony Blunt to Sir John Pope-Hennessy and Millard Meiss. An incomparable testament to a period of seismic change in the museum world, this volume will be essential reading for art world afficianados and all students of art and modern culture.

Genres: Art History

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Michel Laclotte (27 October 1929 – Montauban, 10 August 2021) was a French art historian and museum director, specializing in 14th and 15th century Italian and French painting.

Laclotte championed the idea of turning Paris's gare d'Orsay into a museum, now the Musée d'Orsay. From 1978 he led the team that worked on the future museum's curatorial program until its opening in 1986.

During the 1980's, Laclotte was the director of the Louvre Museum in Paris who oversaw a period of massive change and renovation of that storied institution.

Reviews

[Netta · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the end, this book is a love letter. Unlike many other memoirs, though, it’s not the kind of love letter which an average author of memoirs sends to him/herself in order to congratulate him/herself on a life well-lived and a career well-handled. It’s the love letter to the museum and curator’s craft. Thanks to the fact that Laclotte loves museums more than academic squabbles, this book tells the story of a French museum as an institution and a museum curator as a devoted professional. If you enjoy discussions about truly flattering colour for the walls in the museum as much as I do, you will adore this book.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this, but it reads much more slowly than I anticipated. However, there is some vital information in this book, especially about the history of the migration/ownership of paintings in Europe just before and after World War II.